Sparse Orthogonal Circulant Transform Multiplexing for Coherent Optical Fiber Communication

This paper introduces a new multicarrier system, named sparse orthogonal circulant transform multiplexing (S-OCTM), for optical fiber communication. This technique uses an inverse sparse orthogonal circulant transform (S-OCT) matrix, which is simple and contains only two nonzero elements in each column, to multiplex information of different subcarriers. We compared the proposed scheme with conventional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), orthogonal chirp division multiplexing (OCDM), and discrete-Fourier-transform spreading OFDM (DFT-S-OFDM) in a coherent optical communication system. It is shown that S-OCTM, while exhibiting the complexity among the least, avoids the performance disadvantages of all investigated conventional schemes. It is theoretically proved that the S-OCT matrix equalizes the bandwidth limitation effect that degrades the performance of conventional OFDM. It also shows a greatly reduced peak-to-average power ratio and higher tolerance to fiber nonlinearity than OFDM and OCDM. On the other hand, compared to DFT-S-OFDM, S-OCTM shows a better dispersion tolerance under insufficient length of cyclic prefix and is more tolerable to strong optical filtering. The performance advantages and low complexity enable the proposed scheme to be a promising multicarrier solution for optical communications.